Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Politics of Defining Poverty

Surging numbers of Americans are relying on the government just to put food on the table. Food stamps, a programme designed to ensure that poor Americans have enough to eat, has soared since the recession began. By April it had reached almost 45 million, or one in seven Americans (And the Department of Agriculture, which administers the scheme, reckons only two-thirds of those who are eligible have signed up.) . It is hard to argue that food-stamp recipients are undeserving. About half of them are children, and another 8% are elderly. Only 14% of food-stamp households have incomes above the poverty line; 41% have incomes of half that level or less, and 18% have no income at all. The average participating family has only $101 in savings or valuables. The cutoff for benefits is set at 130 percent of the federal poverty line so it's hard to argue that recipients are in any way well-off.

In the United States there is now a campaign to demonstrate that workers are living comfortable. The Heritage Foundation says the poor possess abundant luxuries , that they are well housed, that they are well fed and are well cared by good medical services, that when the poor struggle to make ends meet, it is merely a struggle to pay for air conditioning and the cable TV bill. “The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.”

Apologists for capitalism have an interest in defining poverty in such a way that only a small minority are classified as poor. Firstly, the "poor" can be portrayed as a minority, small enough not to appear as a serious political threat and not too large as to overwhelm the state's efforts to render them some token "assistance". Secondly, by defining poverty it draws attention away from a structural explanation of poverty, allowing it to be blamed, say, on personality faults. Thirdly, by effectively splitting the working population into those officially classified as "poor" and those who are not, this facilitates the capitalists ideological objective of securing support through a process of "divide and rule".

Indeed, it cannot be denied that technological advances has made affordable to many workers household appliances that were once the province of just privilege. The mass market has arrived: a veritable cornucopia disgorging of fridges, TVs and computers.

The economist, J.K. Galbraith, in The Affluent Society writes "People are poverty-stricken when their income, even if it is adequate for survival, falls markedly below that of the community. Then they cannot have what the larger community regards as the minimum necessary for decency; and they cannot wholly escape, therefore, the judgement of the larger community that they are indecent."

This is "relative poverty" in contrast to what is called "absolute poverty"—the kind of poverty where one has barely enough to survive on. It lends itself to the complacent conclusion we having nothing really to grumble about; at least compared to others less fortunate. Like children, admonished for not eating all their greens, we are told to remember "the starving millions in the Third World".

Amartya Sen, 1998 Nobel Prize winner for Economics, defines poverty in terms of lack of access to means of consumption, to not having enough to live at some minimum level of nutrition or comfort or decency. This means that he and others who think like him have to try to fix what this minimum level is. Inevitably, the result is a more or less arbitrary definition that only applies to a minority of the population; most people not being considered poor because their income is above this low level. The “poor”, in other words, are defined in such a way that they will only ever be a minority of the population. The Christian bible may say that “the poor ye shall always have with you” – but, according to Sen and other economists, this will be only as a small minority.

Rather than see "relative poverty" as something to be contrasted to, and separate from, "absolute poverty" it should be viewed as the anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, observed in his Stone Age Economics "Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all, it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such, it is the invention of civilization"

Marxists define poverty in terms of lack of access to means of production. Anybody in this position is obliged to obtain their living by selling the only thing they do possess - their ability to work - to some employer. They are poor in terms of not owning means of production. Some, indeed most, may be able to obtain a monetary income above the “poverty line” defined by economists and politicians but, being deprived of means of production, they still suffer from poverty. It is true that there will always be some people who (through, illness or incapacity or simply old age, etc) can’t sell their ability to work or, because of its low quality, can’t sell it for a high enough price to cover their basic needs and so, without those hand-outs from the State, would be destitute. This - destitution - is the proper term to describe their situation, not “poverty”. In Marx’s day it was called “pauperism”. It is true that only a minority of the working class find themselves in this situation. But this does not mean that the rest of us — those in regular work — cannot be described as suffering from poverty, deprivation. In the wider, Marxian sense, if you don’t own sufficient means of production to live without having to work to obtain money then you are deprived, or poor. Which is the situation of the vast majority of people under capitalism. The solution lies not in trying to transfer money from the rich to the poor but in abolishing the money system altogether on the basis of the common ownership by the whole people of the means of production. This would end the poverty of the working class as well as the destitution of the minority dependent, if lucky, on State hand-outs or charity.

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